A Jan. 8, 2018, image from earlier Log24 posts tagged The Overnight Case —
A related earlier image —
Friday, June 3, 2022
Venues
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Wednesday March 10, 2004 — m759 @ 4:07 AM “Language was no more than a collection of meaningless conventional signs, and life could absurdly end at any moment. He [Mallarmé] became aware, in Millan’s* words, ‘of the extremely fine line
separating absence and presence, being and nothingness, life and death, which later … he could place at the very centre of his work and make the cornerstone of his personal philosophy and his mature poetics.’ “ — John Simon, "Squaring the Circle"
* A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stéphane Mallarmé , |
See also Cornerstone.
Not-so-mature poetics —
… and completely im mature poetics —
See as well other posts now tagged Taiji , a search for Chinese Checkers,
and a recent Harvard Crimson piece by Gish Jen.
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Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Wednesday March 10, 2004
Ennui of the First Idea
The ennui of apartments described by Stevens in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (see previous entry) did not, of course, refer to the "apartments" of incidence geometry. A more likely connection is with the apartments — the "ever fancier apartments and
"Language was no more than a collection of meaningless conventional signs, and life could absurdly end at any moment. He [Mallarmé] became aware, in Millan’s* words, 'of the extremely fine line
separating absence and presence, being and nothingness, life and death, which
— John Simon, Squaring the Circle
* A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stéphane Mallarmé, by Gordon Millan
The illustration of the "fine line" is not by Mallarmé but by myself. (See Songs for Shakespeare, March 5, where the line separates being from nothingness, and Ridgepole, March 7, where the line represents the "great primal beginning" of Chinese philosophy (or, equivalently, Stevens's "first idea" or Mallarmé's line "separating absence and presence, being and nothingness, life and death.")
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Sunday, March 7, 2004
Sunday March 7, 2004
Apartments
From Wallace Stevens,
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":
It is the celestial ennui of apartments
That sends us back to the first idea, the quick
Of this invention; and yet so poisonous
Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to
The truth itself, the first idea becomes
The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,
Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.
May there be an ennui of the first idea?
What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?….
From Guyan Robertson,
Groups Acting on Affine Buildings
and their Boundaries:
From Plato's Meno:
They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational….
See Logos and Logic
and the previous entry.
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Sunday March 7, 2004
Ridgepole
CBS News Sunday Morning today had a ridgepole ceremony for a house that was moved from China to Salem, Massachusetts.
From the web page
Introduction to the I Ching–
By Richard Wilhelm:
"He who has perceived the meaning of change fixes his attention no longer on transitory individual things but on the immutable, eternal law at work in all change. This law is the tao of Lao-tse, the course of things, the principle of the one in the many. That it may become manifest, a decision, a postulate, is necessary. This fundamental postulate is the 'great primal beginning' of all that exists, t'ai chi — in its original meaning, the 'ridgepole.' Later Chinese philosophers devoted much thought to this idea of a primal beginning. A still earlier beginning, wu chi, was represented by the symbol of a circle. Under this conception, t'ai chi was represented by the circle divided into the light and the dark, yang and yin, 
.
This symbol has also played a significant part in India and Europe. However, speculations of a gnostic-dualistic character are foreign to the original thought of the I Ching; what it posits is simply the ridgepole, the line. With this line, which in itself represents oneness, duality comes into the world, for the line at the same time posits an above and a below, a right and left, front and back-in a word, the world of the opposites."
The t'ai chi symbol is also illustrated on the web page Cognitive Iconology, which says that
"W.J.T. Mitchell calls 'iconology' a study of the 'logos' (the words, ideas, discourse, or 'science') of 'icons' (images, pictures, or likenesses). It is thus a 'rhetoric of images' (Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, p. 1)."
A variation on the t'ai chi symbol appears in a log24.net entry for March 5:
The Line,
by S. H. Cullinane
See too my web page Logos and Logic, which has the following:
"The beautiful in mathematics resides in contradiction. Incommensurability, logoi alogoi, was the first splendor in mathematics."
— Simone Weil, Oeuvres Choisies, éd. Quarto, Gallimard, 1999, p. 100
Logos Alogos,
by S. H. Cullinane
In the conclusion of Section 3, Canto X, of "Notes," Stevens says
"They will get it straight one day
at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight
from the lecture
Pleased that
the irrational is rational…."
This is the logoi alogoi of Simone Weil.
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Friday, March 5, 2004
Friday March 5, 2004
Songs for Shakespeare
from Willie and Waylon
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by Ben Brantley …."Dost thou know me, fellow?" thunders Christopher Plummer, who is giving the performance of a lifetime in the title role of "King Lear"…. Throughout Jonathan Miller's engrossing production of Shakespeare's bleakest tragedy, which opened last night, Mr. Plummer bestrides the boundary between being and nothingness….
The Line, |
LEAR:
Now you better do some thinkin'
then you'll find
You got the only daddy
that'll walk the line.
FOOL:
I've always been different
with one foot over the line….
I've always been crazy
but it's kept me from going insane.
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FOOL:
174. …. Now thou art an 0 without |
"…. in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done. Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known. It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead."
— The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14
Follow-up of Friday, March 5
From Arts & Letters Daily,
Weekend Edition, March 6-7, 2004 —
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Some readers crave awe more than understanding, and lurid pop science is always there to feed their addiction to junk ideas… more» |
Does Shakespeare’s Lear have a spiritual dimension? “No,” insists Jonathan Miller. “That’s modern, New Age drivel…." more» |
The "more" link of the item at left above leads to an American Scientist article titled
The Importance of
Being Nothingness.
The appearance of these two items side-by-side at Arts & Letters Daily, together with Brantley's remark above, is an example of Jungian synchronicity — a concept that the American Scientist author and Jonathan Miller probably both sneer at. Sneer away.
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